Adventure Capital. Julie Kleinman
built, the government was more concerned by the arrival and mobility of rural French migrants in Paris than it was with foreigners (who were often presented as more of an interesting oddity than a danger).80 Before national ID cards, the state imposed interior passports for rural migrants and special papers for workers so that the police could control their movement and manage how many provincials came to the capital.81 Such measures were justified by the representations of moral degeneracy and inferiority created in a context of pseudo-scientific racial classifications and French imperialism.
The development of French colonial administration in the nineteenth century honed racial discourse, while conflicts with European neighbors (especially with Prussia) reinforced the French national project. Colonial administrations developed new means of differentiation, first between citizens and subjects (indigènes), and then among indigènes, who were classified according to how close or distant they were to French “civilization.”82 Spatial organization became one of the mechanisms for managing these distinctions, whether in projects confining newly classified groups (“tribes”) through territorial divisions of vast rural terrain or through the establishment of new cities (villes nouvelles) such as in North Africa, where Haussmann-style urban districts were built next to existing cities.83 Territorial management and urban planning were key techniques of rule in imperial France, both in the colonies and in the metropole.
The idea of a national French identity encompassing rural migrants and the urban poor emerged in the late 1800s and was connected to the expanding colonial endeavor. Before the Third Republic, the foreigner (l’étranger) was not a derogatory term, as Gerard Noiriel observes, and the main social cleavage was not based on nationality but on wealth.84 By the early twentieth century, the provinces had been integrated into a nation consolidated through the policies of the Third Republic (1870–1940), including the erasure of “interior passports” and the imposition of more stringent rules about nationality. Rural migrants, workers, and the urban underclass were still treated as inferior and dangerous, but they were no longer seen as incommensurably different.85 In the North railway company, the emerging divide between French and foreign would become codified in new kinds of separation measures. For example, by 1900, there were at least four types of train cars, each with its own hygiene regulations. The fourth type grouped “emigrants” and “animals” together and had the most stringent cleaning procedure.86
During World War I, more refugees (many from Belgium) arrived in France through the Gare du Nord than any other train station, leading charities to set up offices around the station. These refugees were often arrested by station police and “lumped together by the press alongside ex-convicts and vagrants.”87 In the aftermath of the war, colonial subjects including veteran soldiers, students, and workers became a visible presence in Paris, where they were surveilled by police.88 These populations would come to occupy the position of the dangerous classes, and their otherness would help white provincials, the poor, and European immigrants to be further assimilated into the category French (though these groups would remain marginalized in many ways).89
The history of the once incommensurable difference of provincials and workers would be glossed over in favor of an imagined past of white homogeneity and frictionless assimilation of European immigrants into the French model, troubled only by the occasional emergence of populist xenophobia. This sanitized version has become the palatable history of French immigration; it is the one exhibited at the French national museum of immigration that was opened in 2007.90 This version erases the struggles of integration, the fights for immigrant worker rights, and the significant presence of nonwhite people in metropolitan France, including many West Africans who helped shape Paris and its politics in the 1930s.91
During this period, colonial subjects came to occupy the dangerous slot that threatened the new national order. While workers and the urban poor would remain potential sources of danger and disorder from the state perspective, these groups were no longer seen as a savage race with deviant morals.92 This assimilation was possible because colonial subjects took their place as the dangerous other, and the notion of the dangerous classes took on a reinforced racialized dimension that would be cemented over the course of the twentieth century.93
SHIFTING BOUNDARIES
This history matters in understanding what Yacouba experienced and what many black people experience in French public spaces. It illustrates the centrality of racial distinctions in the creation of the French nation, and shows that racial profiling at the Gare du Nord emerged from earlier classifications and containment practices associated with efforts to repress so-called dangerous classes and ensure fluid circulation. The station has always been governed by an imperial logic. When it was constructed, the most important boundary the state and railway companies sought to enforce was not between French and foreign but rather between rural and urban, working class and bourgeois, in a system where these distinctions signified not only regional or class divides, but also cultural and moral differences that were difficult or impossible to overcome. Class divides and the division between rural and urban persist to this day. However, despite the long-standing practices of marginalizing rural populations, both groups are now incorporated into the ideology of what constitutes French identity.94 This incorporation continues to be denied to Africans and those of African descent.
Racial profiling at the present-day Gare du Nord is also a product of postcolonial migration policy. Until the 1970s, immigration was not a problem to be solved but rather a solution that helped propel the French economy during a period of unprecedented growth in the postwar period, referred to as Thirty Glorious Years. After the Second World War, France needed more workers. In 1954, there were 1,700,000 immigrants in France according to the census; twenty years later, there were almost 3,400,000 (not including naturalized citizens). These foreign workers would become labeled as a problem in 1973 when the oil crisis and recession hit.95 By then, almost all of the places colonized by France in Africa were independent.
New laws meant to curb migration would mean that legal workers already in France could find themselves in “illegal” status. Violent racist incidents were on the rise and being documented by activist groups. In the 1970s, xenophobic discourse was on the rise but was not yet an explicit center of public debate.96 By the mid-1980s, however, the “immigrant problem” would be at the forefront of electoral struggles. By the end of the 1980s, Muslim North Africans, marked by religious and ethno-racial difference, would come to signify the “new dangerous class” in France.97 During this period, as philosopher Etienne Balibar observes, racist discourse became more prevalent, and would come to be couched in cultural terms that imagined a homogenous set of French values, norms, and traditions as threatened by an influx of non-European foreigners.98 As in the 1860s, the development of the dangerous classes would also be accompanied by infrastructural expansion. To support flexible migrant labor, the state and private companies built shaky infrastructures—including substandard housing and the RER commuter line.
The geographer René Clozier argued in 1940 that the Gare du Nord “created the banlieues”—making a peripheral suburban belt where there had been rolling countryside.99 The périphérique highway would help to cement the boundary between the two spaces. When the RER—which workers like Yacouba take to and from the station each day—was inaugurated in the 1970s, it transformed the station. Today, the millions of inhabitants living in the northeast suburbs of Paris make up more than 80 percent of the station’s traffic.100 This traffic constitutes a continuous flow between center and periphery, and illustrates the impossibility of maintaining the separation between the two in a mobility hub.
UTOPIA OR DYSTOPIA?
The development of transportation links, from the Eurostar to London to the RER to the suburbs, has created the international crossroads that makes the Gare du Nord so dear to the West African adventurers who meet there. On a cold night in 2010, Lassana sent me a message with a photo of a stone statue of an enormous head. The head was as tall as the few people passing by at that late hour. It was the largest statue that had been made for the mid-nineteenth-century station, representing Paris at an apex above the other European and provincial cities of the erstwhile Northern Railway Company (nationalized into the SNCF,